Importing scanned data
Thanks for the attempt. I will give it a try.
"MyVeryOwnSelf" wrote in message
...
I have a substantial quantity of tabulated data presented in JPEG
format from scanned hard copies.
The data is typed and "clean".
Is there a freebie utility out there that will "OCR" this data into
.xls format? I appreciate that it will then need careful checking,
but it would still be a lot quicker than typing it all in.
The scanner most always comes with the OCR program.
You cannot "convert" a jpeg to a a text file that Excel could read.
I did an experiment.
Starting with an Excel file containing a rectangular table of random
numbers, I did:
<Alt-Print Screen
Paste the image into the "Paint" program
Trim off the extraneous stuff in Paint.
Print from Paint to MS-Office ImageWriter. (To replicate OP's situation, I
could've started with a jpeg file and printed to ImageWriter.)
In the resulting "Imaging" window, use
Tools Send text to Word
This made an MS-Word document containing a table.
Copy the table and paste it back into a new blank Excel document.
In this round-about round trip, only about 80% of the numbers were
correct.
The problems were primarily recognizing the decimal point. Sometimes it
was
omitted; other times, a digit next to the decimal point was turned into a
letter.
Draw your own conclusions. My conclusion is not to rely on ImageWriter's
OCR for numerical data. Maybe other OCR programs would be better.
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